Why do so many male journalists think female stars are flirting with them?

Vogue’s profile with Selena Gomez is the latest to have an icky fixation on its subject’s looks. Perhaps it’s time for men to be banned from interviewing women

Should male journalists be allowed to interview female celebrities in glossy magazines?
Charlotte, by email
Legally? Debatable. Ethically? Also debatable! This perennial issue has arisen again because of a small furore around a male journalist’s interview with Selena Gomez in a US fashion magazine. Honestly, this piece is pretty restrained, with only a couple of references to the male journalist feeling “protective” of the mega celebrity with her “doll-like” looks and “tiny waist.” But really, I can’t get wildly het up about it when there are SO MANY more egregious examples.
I have been a connoisseur of male journalists’ interviews with female celebrities for several decades now, collecting them as pieces of evidence for my soon-to-be published epic tome, The Male Ego: Beyond Belief. My interest was first piqued by an interview fellow 90s kids might remember, Rich Cohen’s 1995 profile of Alicia Silverstone in Rolling Stone, which opened with the promising sentence, “Alicia Silverstone is a kittenish 18-year-old movie star whom lots of men want to sleep with.” Great start, Rich! As your alter ego Ron Burgundy, would say, compelling and rich. Please, keep going: “Silverstone is a girl you could conceivably date – ” Could you, Rich? COULD YOU? I apologise, please continue – “a girl you did date, even, raised to the highest power. She has the brand new look of a still-wet painting – touch her and she’ll smudge.” Twenty years on, Cohen is still specialising in typing with one hand as proven by his Vanity Fair profile of Margot Robbie, in which he boldly decrees: “She can be sexy and composed while naked but only in character.” Well, it’s hard to compose a sentence that makes sense when all your blood has rushed to the opposite end of your body from your brain. Robbie later described the piece, with admirable understatement, as “really weird”, and, while Cohen ends his article, appearing to be musing about having sex with her, Robbie says she walked away thinking, “That was a really odd interview”. What was odd about it, Margot? He was just thinking about having sex with you. God, stuck up much?
But I think my favourite was US Esquire on Scarlett Johansson: “I didn’t look at her ass,” the male journalist informs us. “I don’t know that she wanted me to. Probably not. Surely not. In any case, I didn’t.” Of course she wanted you to, you fool! It is every woman’s fantasy to be ogled by a tragic male journalist while she tries to do her job.
And it’s not just magazine journalists, of course. Let us all remember, again, the sportswriter who began his interview with an Olympic swimmer with: “The first thing to say about Fran Halsall is that she is beautiful … I was mesmerised.” This was after another article in which he claimed, definitively, “There has always been a soft-porn dimension to women’s tennis,” which is true, because we all know that Serena Williams is only there for your pleasure, male journalist.
But what about the women journalists, you cry? Great question, you! Well, the funny thing is female journalists do not – in my 17-year experience of being one and 25-year experience of reading their work – think male celebrities want to sleep with them and don’t use interviews as an excuse to lech over them. If anything, they’re more likely to poke fun at them, because they get that celebrities generally are ludicrous as opposed to, I don’t know, sexual escorts. In Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s brilliant interview with Tom Hiddleston in last month’s US GQ, she teased out his private-school shallowness, and even when he turned up the next morning at her hotel room, she did not think – as a male journalist would have done in a reverse situation – that he was trying to sleep with her. She got that he just wanted to make sure she understood something (the something in this case being that his relationship with Taylor Swift was, despite all appearances to the contrary, real). Then there was Anna Peele’s excellent interview with Miles Teller in US Esquire in which she unforgettably skewered his pretentiousness.
Doing interviews is weird. I’ve been doing them for a long time now and there is, no question, something vaguely prostitutional about it: there you are, the journalist/client, demanding this far more beautiful person simulate intimacy with you for an hour. Readers seem to get this on some level because one of the most common questions I get asked about my job is if I’ve ever slept with an interviewee, and obviously the answer is no, never even close, partly because I’m too busy worrying if my Dictaphone is working to even think about sex, but mainly because I know both the interviewee and I are just doing our jobs. When Paul Rudd tells me he likes my dress, or Idris Elba asks where my name is from, I have, thank God, the self-awareness to know they are diligently making pleasant chat so that I write how nice they are and tell people to see their movies. I do not think, “Yup, they DEFINITELY want a piece of this.” I don’t know why so many men find it hard to understand female interviewees are not genuinely flirting with them. That ol’ male ego, I guess. Or maybe being in a room with a beautiful woman who in normal circumstances would take out restraining orders against them addles their brain to such an extent that they can no longer tell the difference between their pen and their penis.
Post your questions to Hadley Freeman, Ask Hadley, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Email [email protected].